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laughing_tree
"We set out to create a Ditko-esque hero when we created him, without duplicating any existing Ditko character." -- Kurt Busiek
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laughing_tree "We set out to create a Ditko-esque hero when we created him, without duplicating any existing Ditko character." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #33 - "Permanent Record"
Apr. 17th, 2016 05:27 pmlaughing_tree
"Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are different characters. Tim Hunter and Harry Potter are different characters. Derek Shepherd and Doug Ross, yeah, you got it, different characters. If you’ve got a cool new take on some preexisting character, you may be most of the way toward having a whole new character instead. You don’t need to ask permission to refurbish some company-owned character, but only to the point they’ll let you, and give away all rights. Take those cool new ideas further. Make them into your own character. You wind up with control and ownership. No one can tell you what you can and can’t do with it, and you get to reap the benefits." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #31 - "Nightmare Life"
Feb. 18th, 2016 01:53 pmlaughing_tree
"When I started reading comics, the continuity was a huge part of the appeal to me. Nowadays it’s a drawback. Not the character’s history, but the interlockedness of it all tying up creative vision into narrower boxes than I’d prefer. I’m glad to see Frank Miller’s take on the DC characters in their own world. I’d love to see it for other creators. I’d like to see Mark Waid do _exactly_ what he’d like to do with Superman, without having to be concerned about editorial approval or whether it matches up with what’s going on in FLASH or JLA. I’d like to see Jaime Hernandez do whatever the hell he wanted. Or others. I want ridiculous stories." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #30 - "Enemy of the Empire"
Jan. 24th, 2016 11:43 amlaughing_tree
"It was more because we don’t see that sort of thing in stories of the Skrulls or the Kree or the Khunds or whatever that spurred the story, so the inspiration was in the absence of material more than anything else, I think." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #29 - "The Menace from Earth"
Dec. 18th, 2015 05:58 pmlaughing_tree
'I don’t try to use anyone in ASTRO CITY as an analogue. There are people in the audience who see every character we introduce as a stand-in for someone else, but that’s not really how we approach it. I wanted archetypes, character who it’s easy to understand from a distance, because we’d see the heroes in the background a lot. But I didn’t so much want “a Superman character” or a “Batman character,” so much as I wanted “a noble savior type” or “a nighttime vigilante type.” Batman’s the primo example of that kind of character in comics, but there are lots of them, even pulp characters that predate Batman and influenced him, like The Shadow.' -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #28 - "Yesterday's Heroes"
Nov. 21st, 2015 10:59 pmlaughing_tree
"At the end of 'JLA/Avengers,' I felt like I scratched my Marvel itch. Whatever there was of my 15 or 16-year-old self that said, 'I desperately want to write Marvel comics,' he's satisfied." -- Kurt Busiek on moving away from corporate comics
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Astro City #27 - "Game Over"
Oct. 22nd, 2015 11:12 pmlaughing_tree
"I’d think about comics while walking to school and wonder what it would be like to see Iron Man rocketing down the main street of my hometown, rattling the store windows. Or seeing the posters on my sisters’ walls and thinking about who teen girls in the Marvel Universe would have on their bedroom walls." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #26 - "In Dreams 2015"
Sep. 28th, 2015 06:10 pmlaughing_tree
"We're dealing with something that many comic book universes haven't ever dealt with before, which is that all the characters they started out with are 20 years older. Exploring the changes in these characters and the changes in the world around them and how they cope with it is a way of exploring larger issues about humanity and how we age and what we think about and how we respond to crisis, from a position of, is this generation becoming irrelevant as the next generation's taking over? What's going on?
"It's a bunch of new questions to wrestle with that a superhero universe rarely gets to wrestle with at all." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #25 - "Lucky Girl"
Aug. 17th, 2015 07:09 pmlaughing_tree
'I was thinking about costumes of the mid-Sixties, and how Zatanna and Black Canary both wore fishnet stockings — Black Canary had been wearing them since the late 40s, as it happens, but still, the two of them represented a particular look to me. The sexy gal in the fishnets who kicked ass alongside the boys, but who had a look that was about allure more than action, because it was a different time. I figured Honor Guard could easily have a character like that, and Hummingbird was the result. A bird — particularly a small bird — seemed like something that fit that more sexist era, and I couldn’t recall any time “Hummingbird” had been used.' -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #24 - "Apeman Blues"
Jul. 16th, 2015 01:12 pmlaughing_tree
"I’m not sure I’d be able to tell a story like his in AVENGERS. Well, maybe I could, but it would (a) take a lot longer, and (b) involve a lot more superhero action and fighting, as I wove the plot in and out of traditional action-focused superhero storytelling. And we’d get lots of mail from readers wondering why I couldn’t just use the Beast instead, as if we could tell a story like this with the Beast. And readers unhappy that someone so goofy was showing up at all, much less for an extended period." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #23 - "Sticks"
Jun. 11th, 2015 11:15 amlaughing_tree
"I’ve always said that a superhero universe that doesn’t have talking gorillas in it simply isn’t done yet, so it’s good to get such an essential element established here, after almost twenty years." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #22 - "Hero's Reward"
May. 8th, 2015 03:45 pmlaughing_tree
'[Starfighter] was a hero with an outer-space connection, who’d gone “cosmic” in the 1970s, a la Jim Starlin makeovers of characters like Captain Marvel and Warlock. I suggested to Alex he have a big ol’ biker moustache and energy powers, and left it at that.
'Over the years, he cropped up in the background a lot, which gave me more of a sense of what the character felt like to me, but much of his actual background came up when I was writing this story. I made him a novelist because I’d wanted to use that idea for Carol Danvers at Marvel, didn’t quite get there but still liked it, came up with all the “lorus” stuff as a different way to play “cosmic,” things like that.' -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #20 - "Doing Battle"
Mar. 13th, 2015 10:27 amlaughing_tree
"I want the mainstream to stop being company-owned and shift to creator-owned stuff with a vision." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #19 - "Pushing It"
Feb. 13th, 2015 01:09 amsuperboyprime
"Back when we started, there was nothing like Astro City on the stands, but since then there’ve been a lot of books that take an internal, reflective approach, or explore what it’s like to live in this kind of world. I like to think we’ve had some influence on the industry (though certainly it ain’t all us!), but it means we’re telling stories now in a different world, where Astro City isn’t as different as it once was. So we’re eager to see what else we can do, how we can make it all different still, and surprise people again the way we did in the early days." -- Kurt Busiek
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icon_ukI've been through a LOT of writers in my time, in the comic book consumer sense of course. Some have been great, some have been pretty awful, some have been workmanlike, and some have transcended the genre.
Neil Gaiman was a terribly tempting choice, as were Alan Moore and Grant Morrison (particularly early in their career), who were genuinely groundbreaking in the US comic format, and Gaiman at least still earns an automatic (if trial) pull on any new title he writes, and Mark Gruenwald deserves honorary mention for producing many excellent stories playing in the Marvel toybox, but there's another who IMHO always produces quality work. If he's writing the "classic" characters he treats them with respect but not reverence, and usually has a new twist on them, and if he's writing his own characters they may seem somewhat familiar, but there's something else going on to surprise us.
I mean, of course...
( ...Kurt Busiek )
Neil Gaiman was a terribly tempting choice, as were Alan Moore and Grant Morrison (particularly early in their career), who were genuinely groundbreaking in the US comic format, and Gaiman at least still earns an automatic (if trial) pull on any new title he writes, and Mark Gruenwald deserves honorary mention for producing many excellent stories playing in the Marvel toybox, but there's another who IMHO always produces quality work. If he's writing the "classic" characters he treats them with respect but not reverence, and usually has a new twist on them, and if he's writing his own characters they may seem somewhat familiar, but there's something else going on to surprise us.
I mean, of course...
( ...Kurt Busiek )
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Astro City #17 - "Sorrowsday"
Dec. 10th, 2014 10:44 amlaughing_tree
"You’ll be seeing the story of Krigari Ironhand, Honor Guard’s greatest (or at least most persistent) foe, what’s behind their decades-long series of clashes and why Honor Guard, once a year, gets a mysterious delivery of delicious alien crimson baked goods." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #16 - "Wish I May..."
Nov. 9th, 2014 03:14 pmlaughing_tree
'One of [my earliest sample scripts], “The 24-Hour Truce of Lex Luthor,” was an 8-page script for the “Superman: The In-Between Years” backup feature that ran then in SUPERMAN, detailing his early college days. Like I said, it didn’t sell—Associate Editor E. Nelson Bridwell told me it was “perfectly publishable,” but that they’d ended that particular backup feature, and so there was no place to put it. . . . So that’s how this issue is simultaneously my latest release and one of my first-ever scripts.' -- Kurt Busiek
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